English Translation of Leibniz, "Historia inventionis phosphori" (1710)

 I came across this paper by Leibniz a couple years ago while researching the experiments of Francis Hauksbee for my YouTube series on the Experimental History of Electricity. My Latin wasn't quite good enough to read the paper fluently, so I came back to it now and again to work through it once more, and judge my progress. The last hurdle was translating Leibniz's poem on phosphorus, an excerpt from a longer epicedium (Latin mourning poem) for Duke Johannus Friderick. You can actually find my questions on both the prose and the poetry on sites like History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange, and the Latin subreddit. I'm very grateful for everyone's help and input.

This translation was also notable for being the first where I turned to ChatGPT for helping to understand allusions, parse tricky Latin passages, and review my translations for errors. It rarely provided complete accuracy, but it was enough to get me unstuck, or correct misunderstandings I had. None of the writing here was formatted or edited by the LLM, but it served a good purpose during the process, and I thought it better to accept and acknowledge this than to deny it, or to pretend that the work is mine alone. 

This is not exactly a work of scholarship - my goal was not to set any record straight about phosphorus and its discovery, nor to provide a comprehensive overview and bibliography of existing evidence. This can already be found in the wonderful paper, Krafft, F., "Phosphorus. From Elemental Light to Chemical Element." Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl., 8 (1969): pp. 660-671. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.196906601. However, I have included some excerpts of relevant works which I thought would be of interest during the reading. These were translated mostly from French, which in some cases was still not the original language (that being German, typically). 

This paper by Leibniz was originally published in the first volume of the Miscellanea Berolinensia, pp. 91-98. See my article on navigating learned societies. The Miscellanea Berolinensia was a publication of the Königliche-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (aka the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin; or the Royal Academy of Berlin). On HathiTrust this can be found under the modern name

Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. They published seven volumes between 1710-1744 under the name Miscellanea Berolinensia, mostly in Latin, before reorganizing in 1744.

Liebniz is correcting an account given by Homberg in the Mémoires de mathématique et de physique: tiré des registres de l'Académie Royale des Sciences‎ (1692), p. 74. Link.

The year of discovery of phosphorus was originally given by Homberg as 1669. It became known to the public through the travels of Krafft beginning in 1676-1677, and Leibniz, early on in his Historia, declares that id inventum circa annum 1667 prodiit, "this discovery appeared/came forth around the year 1667." This is the same year in which Leibniz himself was first shown the phosphorus by the chymist Krafft, as reported in the Journal des Sçavans for 2 Aug. 1677. It has sometimes been misunderstood that Leibniz's remark meant that, to his knowledge, phosphorus was discovered around 1676. However, the verb prodire here is better understood to mean that the discovery was made known to the public. This is further justified by Leibniz's original account, in which the chymist Krafft claimed to have already kept the phosphorus in a glass for two years. Additionally, Leibniz makes no further correction to Homberg's account regarding the date of 1669. The matter is discussed further in the (modern) Krafft's paper cited above, settling on the year 1669 as a reasonable date for the discovery.

Source files:

• Original Latin, in markdown, with typographic corrections
• Translation, Latex Source

Translation: